§1.1 Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns determining demographic information. In particular, the present invention concerns probabilistically determining demographic information for a domain, such as a Website for example.
§1.2 Background Information
Demographic targeting is an important mode of targeting used by advertisers. Currently, demographic information is typically only available for large Websites on the Internet. This is likely because the third parties that supply demographic information do so using a panel of 50,000-100,000 users. Consequently, these third parties can only get statistically significant user data for large Websites. This means that there is no way for these third parties to infer the user demographics for the vast majority of Websites on the Internet. This is unfortunate, because having reliable Internet-wide demographics, would enable more advertising revenue to become available to smaller Websites, instead of just the large ones for which demographics are known.
Naturally, small Websites could self-describe their demographics. However, advertisers would probably not trust data supplied directly by the Website owner. For example, Website owners have an incentive to say “My visitors are all spendthrift millionaires”, whether or not this is true, in order to attract high-revenue advertisements.